Ayers, R.L.

ORAL HISTORY OF R.L. AYERS
Interviewed by Chris Albrecht
Filmed by Rick Greene
Significant Productions
November 3, 2005
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. ALBRECHT: … your full name and where you live.
MRS. AYERS: My name is R.L. Ayers. I live at 141 Wilberforth Avenue, Oak Ridge, TN.
MR. ALBRECHT: Thank you very much. Now, what year did you first come to oak ridge and tell me a little bit about that.
MRS. AYERS: I came to Oak Ridge, October 1943. I was working at an Army camp in Grenada, Mississippi, near my hometown. This friend came by and said, “I heard of this place in Tennessee where you can make good money. Would you like to go?” I said, “Yes. Sure.” She said, “Well, I’ll get two tickets.” And she did. We headed out to Tennessee. It was not Oak Ridge at that time. We came to Kingston, Tennessee. We crossed over on a little boat on over, it was called J.A. Jones at the time. So we came on to the Personnel there, which we were there all day long at the Personnel trying to get processed in. Then they took us to the hutments, where Black people lived. Black people and white people did not live in the same area. White people had barracks and dormitories, but Black people had huts to live in and that was it for the Black people. The huts were something like a box, made like a box. It had four beds in it. And if they needed more space they would put 8 beds in it, double beds. It had a big pot belly stove in the center of the floor and that was the heat. So we had no running water, no place to cook and no bathrooms in this place. They had a big long place they called it the latrine. That’s where you had to go to do your washing, do your cooking if you wanted to cook anything, take a bath and use the bathroom.
MR. ALBRECHT: When you arrived and you saw where you would be living, did you suddenly have second thoughts?
MRS. AYERS: I didn’t see where I was going to be living until I was bused there. No, I was too far from home then and broke at that. (Laughter) I didn’t have any second thoughts. I thought, “Well, we’ll make it.” That’s what I thought to myself that we will make it. So, they had only one building and we came to the K-25 area. They had one building then that was the K-25 building. Of course, you know they built more building, which were 33 and 1401 and all that. But there was only one building then and that was the K-25 building. We went to work at that building. If you were Black, even if you had a master’s degree it made no difference. All you could do was sweep up, clean up. In ’43, that’s all that you could do. So, I wasn’t making but $1.47 an hour, but it was better than where I came from. I worked at the K-25 building I guess maybe for a month. After I began to learn things, I went to the J.A. Jones. They owned the cafeteria. J.A. Jones was building that area down through there. That was the construction gang that was building down through there. So I went to work for J.A. Jones in the cafeteria and I didn’t have to buy my food. That’s why I went there.
MR. GREENE: Chris, we need to change batteries.
[Break in tape]
MR. GREENE: We’re rolling.
MR. ALBRECHT: Were you married when you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. AYERS: No, I was not. But I hadn’t been here very long before I got married. My husband came from Huntsville, Alabama. He was a concrete finisher here. He had worked with Hal Williams and the construction and all that because that was the only thing for Black males to do was construction and my husband worked in construction.
MR. ALBRECHT: You mentioned a few minutes a go about it didn’t matter as a Black person, it didn’t matter if you had a master’s degree you were going to be sweeping the floor.
MRS. AYERS: That’s right.
MR. ALBRECHT: Did you know of or did you meet any, or hear of any educated Black people that were here pushing brooms.
MRS. AYERS: As every Black person here. Every Black people here. No Black person held a high position or worked in an office or anything like that.
MR. ALBRECHT: Where there any of the Blacks that had college degrees that you know of?
MRS. AYERS: Yes, yes, it was.
MR. ALBRECHT: And they were pushing brooms.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, they were still a maid. You know, I have made the statement once that this place was owned and operated by the federal government and it was sad the way that the Black people were treated.
MR. ALBRECHT: Now at that time, at the time of the war, President Roosevelt signed executive order 8802 that said it was illegal to discriminate if you were a war time industry. And yet in Oak Ridge that was patently ignored. They said they would go along with the local customs instead. Was that widely known among the workers that there was that executive order and it was being ignored?
MRS. AYERS: Maybe some of them knew about it. But not everybody. People just didn’t have time to talk with each other. Even if they did it wouldn’t have done any good. It was just something else they knew about it. But I always had an exploring mind. I wanted to know if the grass was greener on the other side of the hill or not. So I kept my nose into everybody’s business, but it was just things that I wanted to find out. They said, “Oh, she talks too much.” That’s what they thought about me. I talked too much. But that was just the way it was.
MR. ALBRECHT: You had mentioned that you hadn’t been here very long at all before you met and married your husband.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Once you became man and wife, were you able to live together?
MRS. AYERS: No, we was not. They had, in these huts that I was talking about; they were inside what they would call a pen. They had all the women in one pen and the men were in another pen. They had board, five foot board around it with a strand of barbed wire at the top that you could not get in or get out. You had to come in by the guard. They had one way in and one way out. That was the men and the women. There was no family life for Black people here until the late, late ‘40’s. That was just the life for Black people. That was the reason that I said a while ago that it was awful the way that Black people were treated and it was in the federal government, all of it.
MR. ALBRECHT: Humans are what they are and they’ve got a way of overcoming obstacles. How did husbands and wives get together?
MRS. AYERS: Well, on weekends when you weren’t working you could go to Knoxville. You could go to Knoxville and spend the weekend with your husband or husband with wife. That was it. When you came back, you went to your pen and he went to his pen.
MR. ALBRECHT: Were the other women in your hut, were they all married or were they all single?
MRS. AYERS: No, they was not. They weren’t all married, maybe one of them or two of them. No, they was not all married.
MR. ALBRECHT: Again, people find a way to do things. Were there people sneaking out at night and getting away with it?
MRS. AYERS: No, you couldn’t sneak out at night because the guard was sitting at the gate and you couldn’t get out of the pen. So there was no way to get out. As I said, there was one way in and one way out.
MR. ALBRECHT: You said that the white workers had different housing.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Where were they housed?
MRS. AYERS: They was housed, oh, it was called Clinton Engineer. It was where Scarboro, old man Scarboro owned all that property in there. It was something like barracks for soldiers and of course they moved all the soldiers and everything out. That is where white people lived. They had running water; they had family lives, because a man could live with his wife there and the children. And they had white schools for white children. There was no Black children here, so there were no schools. It wasn’t until ’46 and ’47 that they started letting Black children come here. So…
MR. GREENE: Chris let me, again, I want to ask the question, talk to Chris, were there white people that lived in the hutments in the pens.
MRS. AYERS: No. No white people ever lived in the pen. None. No.
MR. GREENE: Amazing.
MR. ALBRECHT: Truly amazing. I want to get into talking more about work, but before we get into work, while we’re still talking about living conditions, husbands and wives, that sort of thing. Are there any special stories you can think of that would be appropriate to tell about anything that we haven’t asked questions about, as far as living conditions and that type of thing?
MRS. AYERS: There probably is if I could think of them because I have told many stories about things that happened here. But today, I couldn’t tell you anything. I had my mind, it kind of drifted away on this other stuff when they served this subpoena on me just before I came here.
MR. ALBRECHT: I understand, I truly do. As were…
MR. GREENE: I was going to say what I think you were going to say.
MR. ALBRECHT: Go ahead.
MR. GREENE: If it comes to mind, just tell them. Even if we don’t ask.
MRS. AYERS: Alright.
MR. ALBRECHT: As we go down through here something might pop into your head, let me know that it did and we’ll be sure to get that. I want to talk a little bit about what life was like at work. You started to talk about that, but tell me again, what was your, you told me your job, you was sweeping floors and then you went to work in the cafeteria, correct?
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Tell us a little, which one of those jobs did you work at the longest, the cafeteria or the broom?
MRS. AYERS: I worked at the cafeteria the longest and when they finished this part over here which was called Clinton Engineer, they had a hospital over here. So, then I transferred to the hospital and went to the hospital to work. I worked there for 56 years at the hospital.
MR. ALBRECHT: Tell me a little bit about what your work was at the cafeteria, and then I want to hear about what you did at the hospital.
MRS. AYERS: Well, in the cafeteria, you just cleaned up after, it’s just like working in a cafeteria, and you know a restaurant. You just clean up and washed dishes and stuff like that. Kept it clean.
MR. ALBRECHT: So you didn’t work as like a cook or anything?
MRS. AYERS: Oh, no. No.
MR. ALBRECHT: Pardon my naivety. I wasn’t there, so that’s why I ask the questions. (Laughter) Tell us about how you happened to find the job at the hospital, and how you got over there, and what your job there was.
MRS. AYERS: Well, I was always off into the medical departments, where ever I was, you know. That was really my field, was medical. And they were hiring everybody. It didn’t make any difference who and where. They would hire you, whether it was sweeping a floor, whether it was cooking, or cleaning, or what. Any time that you could walk off of this job over to this job, they would hire you over there. You could get a job anywhere you say I want to work. So, I went to the hospital and I started working there as an aide. You know what an aide is? Helping patients. And I started to working there. I stayed there for 56 years. I worked in the emergency department and when the doctors took over the emergency room, I had too much seniority with the hospital to go under the doctors. So I went to surgery and I started working in the anesthesia department. That is where I retired from was anesthesia.
MR. ALBRECHT: I assume you got training along the way and constantly…
MRS. AYERS: Well, yes, I did get some training, but I did a lot of training myself. I did because I always had my ears open to everything. I worked with the doctors. I waited on them and I helped them. If there was anything I wanted to know, I would ask them. Of course, they would tell me whatever I asked them, they would tell me. I always had an exploring mind. I told you that. (Laughter)
MR. ALBRECHT: You alluded to it earlier, when you first decided to come from Mississippi up here to work. You said part of it was the lure of good money. What kind of money did you make throughout the war years?
MRS. AYERS: I made $1.35 an hour. That was good money from where I came from. I came out of Mississippi where I was making $2.00 a week. So $1.35 an hour was good money. I worked my way on up the ladder.
MR. ALBRECHT: Good for you. What did you do in Mississippi before you came to Tennessee?
MRS. AYERS: I worked as a soda jerk at Camp McCain. I worked as a soda jerk.
MR. ALBRECHT: And made that huge, huge salary doing it. (Laughter)
MRS. AYERS: Yes, $2.00 a week.
MR. ALBRECHT: Oh, my. I have heard some other folks being asked to and agreeing to giving a day of work for the bomb.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, everybody was asked to give one of the time and a half days, or a double time day, which if you worked a Saturday or Sunday, it was Saturday was a time and a half, Sunday would be double time. Everybody gave a day’s work to the building of the atomic bomb.
MR. ALBRECHT: Which brings up another question. This was during the time that the atomic bomb was being developed. This was a big secret. This was a secret city. Say nothing, ask nothing. How did people, how did they ask you to donate to the bomb if nobody knew they were building a bomb.
MRS. AYERS: Well, people knew that they were building a bomb. They knew that. Of course, you know the bomb wasn’t built here. Only part of it. They had six plants in the United States where the bomb was built. Of course, It was assembled in California and then shipped on over to be dropped. People didn’t know that and people really didn’t care anything about that. But that’s what happened.
MR. ALBRECHT: So it was, the bomb wasn’t too big a secret. It was just a little bit of a secret, I guess.
MRS. AYERS: Well, it was a secret because they had like Hal said, “What you see here, what you hear here, you leave it here.” You didn’t talk about anything.
MR. ALBRECHT: What about while you were here? Did people talk; did people try to figure out what was going on?
MRS. AYERS: No, I don’t think they really cared. I don’t think so. Maybe they did care. There wasn’t anybody to talk to about it. Who could you talk to? I couldn’t talk to my neighbor because they didn’t know anything about it, and didn’t want to know anything about it.
MR. ALBRECHT: What typically were you told about the overall mission of the Manhattan Project and the Clinton Engineer Works? Or did anybody ever say, just do your job.
MRS. AYERS: Just do your job. That was it. Just do your job.
MR. ALBRECHT: What did you think when you first learned that an atomic bomb that was partially developed here was dropped on Japan?
MRS. AYERS: Hiroshima? Well, I knew that part of it was made here. I knew that because my ears were always open. I couldn’t say anything or couldn’t talk to anybody about anything. There was nobody to talk to about it. But I listened to everything that was said. I went down. If I was anywhere around it, I heard it. But that was it.
MR. ALBRECHT: I keep getting this reoccurring theme that you were an inquiring mind.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Did you have any other family members that were working up here?
MRS. AYERS: No, I did not.
MR. ALBRECHT: Was there anyone else? Well, you mentioned you came up, were there many people from your hometown.
MRS. AYERS: No, there was only myself and Francis Sharper. We were the only two from my hometown here. We really wasn’t from the same town. She came from Dove Hill, and I came from Carrolton, which was about 12 miles, because we knew each other. But that was it.
MR. ALBRECHT: You said earlier that she said hey they’re hiring people up in Tennessee and there is good money to be made. How did she learn about it?
MRS. AYERS: I don’t really know. I don’t really know how she found out about it. She worked for Dr. Rayford, a doctor there in Grenada, Mississippi, and maybe she got it from them. But anyway, she told it to me and we started running.
MR. ALBRECHT: I know there was a lot of recruiting and they needed a lot of labor and I didn’t know how she might have heard, if somebody came through town or what might have happened. How did you first learn about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima?
MRS. AYERS: How did I learn about it? It was nationwide at that time on the radio when it was dropped. Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: I didn’t know if you might have heard it on the radio, or heard about it from a friend, or something else.
MRS. AYERS: No, I didn’t hear it from a friend. I heard about it from the radio, the news. That was the day the world stood still.
MR. ALBRECHT: What did you think when you first learned, you know, when you heard that bomb had been dropped what were your thoughts?
MRS. AYERS: I said, “Oh! That was a part of what we were doing.” You know how things will all come to you. So, that was the first thing that I thought. That’s what we were giving the free time for and all of that. But it was somewhere else. So that didn’t bother me too much. It should have, but it didn’t.
MR. ALBRECHT: How do you feel about that today?
MRS. AYERS: Well, I don’t know. Not really. You know I said that God used the most destructive weapon known to man to bring people together. And that’s how I feel about that. So, I guess we would have still been running here, running there, and people against people, which they still are. But He did bring people together. Here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, He brought them together here. People was, they didn’t care anything about anything, they didn’t care anything about people, their friends or neighbor, or anything like that. So, something had to happen. Something had to happen to bring them together. And I think that atomic bomb did bring them together. Now, that’s how I feel about it and I could be wrong because I am wrong sometimes, but not all the time.
MR. ALBRECHT: When it comes to an opinion yours is always right. (Laughter) This may be a hard question, it may not be, but if you had it to do all over again, especially considering what your life was like before coming here and what it was like after coming here, would you do it again?
MRS. AYERS: Yes, I guess that I would. I guess that I would, not knowing any better, I would. Of course, where would you go, what would you have to do if you did know better and this is what was happening. I guess you would have to join, as I say the gang.
MR. ALBRECHT: I can’t imagine. You came here; you met your husband here. You made a life here.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Obviously you stayed here. When the war ended, what made you decide to stay here? I guess I should preface that with where was your husband from.
MRS. AYERS: My husband was from Huntsville, Alabama.
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s right. You already said that. I’m sorry. Why did you choose to stay here?
MRS. AYERS: Well, didn’t anybody know me back then. I had been gone a long time. Nobody knew me back there. This was home. I had made friends here, so where else would I go? And now, I’m 83 years old. There is no place for me to go. My husband is dead. One of my sons live in Cool Rapids, Minnesota, and the other is in Albuquerque New Mexico. It’s just me here. I do have grandchildren that live over in Knoxville, but this is home. Nobody back in Carrolton, Mississippi, knows me, not half of my people.
MR. ALBRECHT: What other stories, or what else comes to mind when you think about the war years here at, what is now Oak Ridge. I know it wasn’t Oak Ridge then.
MRS. AYERS: Well, I don’t know.
MR. ALBRECHT: What about recreation and so forth? Did you work so hard during the week that you didn’t have time to think about it? Was there recreation? What did you do with your free time?
MRS. AYERS: Well, I didn’t have much free time because I had two boys and all of my time went to them. I started them out at the Boy’s Club there. I followed them all the way from kindergarten on to Austin-Peay University. So my life was busy. It was always busy. If it wasn’t my children, it was somebody else’s. I remember that these little boys, I guess there was maybe six or eight of them and they were always at my house. When I would get off of work, it didn’t make no difference how tired I was, I would look up and there were all these little boys around. But I would rather these little boys be at my house than my children at somebody else’s house. So I would come in and I would fix hot dogs or hamburgers and I didn’t have enough chairs for them to sit down. So I stood them up around the table. They all stood around the table and had their hot dog. So one of my neighbors, he said to me, “You know,” says, his son was named Robert. He said, “There is something wrong with Robert,” said, “I can’t get him to eat anything,” and I laughed. He said, “What you laughing about?” I said simply, “Because he is eating three meals at my house. How can he eat at home?” He said, “Well, don’t feed him anymore then. Don’t feed him.” Well, I said, “You better keep him at home because if he is there and the other children are eating,” I said, “he’ll eat, too.” So that was, I told him that. Of course he didn’t stop me, he just left him alone. He was still eating at my house. Another little boy said to me one day, said, he kept sitting around, we were sitting out in the yard, and he said, “I heard my mom and daddy talking last night.” I said, “You did?” I said, “Well, what did they say?” He said, “That they didn’t want me.” I said, “You mean they said they didn’t want you. He said, “Hmm-mm.” I knew he was telling a story, but he wanted to live at my house is what he wanted to do, you know. So I said, “Oh, surely they didn’t mean that?” He said, “I heard them say it.” So I saw his parents and I told them what he said. I said, “Now don’t go and jump on him for saying that.” I said that I knew that he was not telling me the truth. They said, “No. The thing of it is that he wants to come to your house and live. That’s what it is.” They loved my house because I was always good to them and I was always doing things with them. I was always taking them places, regardless. I went to work on midnights at the hospital, so that I could have the time to spend with my children. I worked on midnights so I had all these other little boys too there.
MR. ALBRECHT: You must have been exhausted all the time.
MRS. AYERS: I was. I was, but I enjoyed it all. I enjoyed it all. Even when my boys started in high school, they couldn’t come home and tell me anything that I wouldn’t check out. I would check out everything. I was not going to the school and have a fuss with the teacher until I checked it out. I had to know that they were telling me the truth. They was afraid. They wouldn’t tell me no tale, because they knew that I was going to check it out. But I enjoyed all of that. And anything that went on at the high school with them or the teacher or anybody else, I was always there. I was always there. I don’t care what it was and even one of my sons had started missing class down there at Austin-Peay University. One of the teachers called me and was telling me about it. I said, “Okay, I’ll be down there.” I would jump in my car. It wouldn’t make any difference to me. I would go. I went down to Austin-Peay University to see what was going on down there. My son had left with another boy going down to Memphis, Tennessee. Yes, he did too. But I got all that straightened out. All of it straightened out.
I admire your involvement in your children’s lives. There is not enough of that.
No, that is true, there is not.
MR. ALBRECHT: Let me back up a little bit before your sons were born, before the war was over. Obviously, you couldn’t have a family here during the war. What did you do for recreation in those days.
MRS. AYERS: No, let me go back to my children. Both of my boys was adopted. Both of my boys was adopted and I adopted them from the Methodist Medical Center Oak Ridge Hospital. So they had never been in no other home except mine because one of them was five days old when I took him home from the hospital and the other one was two weeks because he was premature before I took him home from the hospital, but both of my boys was adopted.
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s a wonderful story.
MRS. AYERS: And then for recreation?
MR. ALBRECHT: During the war.
MRS. AYERS: You could go to; they had a recreation hall, where all the Black people could meet. They called it the Recreation Hall and everybody would go there. If you wanted to dance, they had a rock hall in there; they had a pool table in there. You could shoot pool if you wanted to. They had a basketball goal outside that you could play basketball. Whatever you wanted to do you had to do it right around that recreation hall there. That was, and as I said, there was a curfew, 10 o’clock at night, and everybody had to be in their hut because there was a hut check. But that was the only recreation. And the only way you could be out after 10 o’clock at night, you would have to be, see I played on the basketball team and if I went to Knoxville or Kingston or somewhere, you know, if I got in after 10 it was alright but otherwise I had better be in.
MR. ALBRECHT: Tell us a little bit about the basketball team.
MRS. AYERS: Well they had a basketball team. As I said they had people from every walk of life at that, at K-25, but the only jobs that they could have there was maid and construction, but people who wanted to form a basketball team, they could because we did have teachers there and they could and they did. Whoever wanted to join the basketball team, it was alright. So I joined the basketball team because I played basketball at high school when I was at home. So I joined the basketball team. It was a way of getting out and getting away.
MR. GREENE: Hey Chris, a follow up to that.
MR. ALBRECHT: Sure.
MR. GREENE: Was it a Black basketball team, or mixed?
MRS. AYERS: No, it was Black. It was all Black.
MR. ALBRECHT: Those were certainly the ugly days of segregation and discrimination. What other examples of that sort of thing did you see working here during the war?
MRS. AYERS: Well, everything was segregated to the max here during that time and as I said, I kept my nose off into everybody’s business and everything, so in the late ‘40’s and the early ‘50’s I remember that they had the Black children could not go to school here. They had to be bused to Clinton, over in Clinton, Tennessee, or if they were in high school they had to go to Austin-East. There was Oak Ridge High school, but the Black children could not go. Well in 1951, they did let the Black children graduate. It was 3 of them that graduated. And they held two graduations in 1951. They had a Black one and a white one. So those three Black children graduated on a Monday night and the other white children graduated on a Friday night. Yes. So then we started working on trying to get the schools segregated, integrated, ‘cause it was segregated to the max. We started trying and we met with the school principals and teachers here. The principal didn’t even want to talk to us because he knew that they wasn’t going to do that. So, what we did was we sat down and wrote Mr. Faraly. His name was Faraly in Washington D.C. and we asked him for a telephone number because we wanted to call him and talk to him about the Oak Ridge school system. We got a telephone number from him and we called him and told him to sit down because we wanted to tell him something. We didn’t want him to fall down, but sit down. So he laughed, and he said he couldn’t believe the things that we told him that was going on here in the school system. But in 1955, they opened the doors to the school and I have newspaper clippings and everything. I was looking at them last night, I think it was last night that I was looking at those newspaper clippings where Mr. Dunnigan, the principal, when he met the children to greet them he told them that this wasn’t to educate them, but to, to educate them, but to how to get along with other people. Yes, he did. I can’t get it together, but I was looking at that last night. He wanted them to know that this was to educate them on how to get along with their peers. He said, “But we will consider race and color, he said, but not before anything else is considered.” I wish I had brought that with me.
MR. ALBRECHT: That makes me want to ask a question. You’ve obviously got mementos from the war and during that time, integration and so forth.
MRS. AYERS: Yes. Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: As this project rolls forward and we have a use for that type of material. I hope it would be alright to contact you and get copies or scan these things so we can use these in this. Rick, do you have any other questions?
MR. GREENE: Yeah. In fact I do. I was wondering, I know I’ve been just sort of amazed when I hear the stories of the changes that happened between 1943 and 1945 in this community. I was wondering, I know for me things get to be a blur, but if you could describe, or if you could remember what this place looked like when you arrived and then what it looked like two years later. Is that something that you could kind of talk about the changes that took place between the time you arrived and say 1945, 6?
MR. ALBRECHT: That means you’re going to have to talk about mud.
MRS. AYERS: Yes. That is just about all it was here - mud and boardwalks. There was no concrete walks or anything like that. It was just a place where people had to live and that was it. There was nothing of any importance or anything. Nothing because at K-25 there was nothing there that you could compare with anything else anywhere in the world, I know. As time, it wasn’t until the ‘50’s when the thing was beginning to come together and you know building things and the way it would look like someplace to live. Of course, you know this is the city that was built twice. At first it was the city behind the fence and then when the gates came down it was an open city. It was built twice. The first city was nothing. But it was the city.
MR. ALBRECHT: It was what the fourth of fifth largest city in the state. It was amazing what they did in such a short amount of time.
MRS. AYERS: Well, people came here from all over the United States they came here. Of course from Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama, more people from those three states than any other states in the United States came here. They went, I think it was 175,000 in ’46, not quite sure. I don’t know.
MR. GREENE: I guess the other question, and I think you have touched on some, but what it was like, I understand that things were rationed. I’ve heard people say if there was a line they stood in it. It didn’t matter what it was for, but it was something they needed. I wonder how it was different for the Blacks and for the whites, and you know, when you’re not at work.
MRS. AYERS: Well, you couldn’t compare the Blacks with the whites because if there was something going on here for the Black, the white was not there. If there was anything going on over there for the whites, the Blacks weren’t there. You couldn’t compare one with the other one. Did that answer your question?
MR. GREENE: Yeah.
MR. ALBRECHT: It was two different worlds all together.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. It was.
MR. ALBRECHT: Have you thought of any other stories of things that happened during that time period that you would like to talk about, or just commentary on the whole process, you know all that happened here.
MRS. AYERS: No. no.
MR. ALBRECHT: You’ve done a wonderful job.
MRS. AYERS: Well, thank you.
MR. GREENE: You’ll probably walk out the door saying, “Ahh!”
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s the way it works.
MRS. AYERS: You know back in the early ‘40’s and nobody knew what they were doing, you know they were just working doing what they were told to do. So, this one guy told his supervisor that he was going to quit. He said, “Why are you going to quit?” He said, “I’m going to get me a real war job.” Because all the trucks coming and nothing ever going out, he said, “I want a war job.” So he quit his job and left. People didn’t know what they were doing, or where they were going or what was happening. This carpenter he had a set answer for anything anyone would ask him. Somebody asked him, “Oh, what are you doing?” He was making something you know. He said, “What are you making?” He said, “$1.35 an hour.” (Laughter) That was his answer to everything, “$1.35 an hour.”
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s funny. I like that. (Laughter)
MR. GREENE: We have sat through so many of these interviews; you may have already answered this question. You know Valeria Roberson?
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. GREENE: The essay she wrote for some book…
MR. ALBRECHT: “These are our voices.”
MR. GREENE: Yes. She entitled, “A New Hope”. She talked about, it’s kind of interesting the stories that we have heard was not that people were recruited, its word of mouth. Somebody knew someone that said you ought to come up here and work. One of the things she talked about was that there was a new hope that things would be different here. So I was wondering if you could talk about that. We know that there were a lot of things that weren’t different, regardless of that executive order that the president issued about it being illegal to discriminate. We know that didn’t happen, but in general, how were things here compared to I guess things where you had come from. Does that make any sense?
MRS. AYERS: Yes, that makes sense, but where I came from was nothing like this place as far as segregation was concerned. You could talk to a white person, or you could go around them, where I came from. When I got here, no, there was no way. The Black people, as they used the term, lived across the railroad tracks, and of course, you didn’t go across the railroad tracks here. You just stayed on this side and they were on that side. And that was that. I had talked to Valeria about a lot of stuff that went on here because you see Valeria came here as a little girl. She was wanting to know a few things that happened here. But no, there was no comparison from where I came from and this place here. None, what so ever.
MR. GREENE: So this was even more segregated.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, it really was. and you know when we tried to start integrate the places here in Oak Ridge, well the one that always go back to my mind is the Laundromat up on Jefferson Circle and we was, went to the Laundromat to wash and the Laundromat was owned by a man named Joe Young. He said we couldn’t wash there. So we started picketing his place. Well one day we noticed that all these policemen were there. After a while here come 10 cars of Ku Klux Klan they came and the police surrounded the place. We was just marching and singing “We shall overcome”. The Ku Klux Klan got out of their cars. They were hooded; they were wearing their hoods, went in the Laundromat, took off their robes, washed them, dried them, came back out and put down a sign where we were marching. And the sign read, “The Ku Klux Klan has been here”. So all these policemen, they were from Knoxville, Clinton, Oak Ridge, Kingston, and everywhere. Of course they had the place surrounded, they called it, oh, what did they say that was? Spreading the eagle. They spread the eagle. We were scared to death, but we wasn’t doing nothing but marching and singing, you couldn’t let anybody know that you were afraid. You just kept singing. They went on and got in their cars and pulled off. So I guess maybe 4 or 5 carloads of police followed them on out Oak Ridge to Maryville. They was from Maryville, Tennessee. They went on back and we didn’t have no more problems with that.
MR. ALBRECHT: Those stories just amaze me. These are things that happened in my lifetime, but I don’t, I was a child. I didn’t know what was going on.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Because we have come a long ways.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, but we still have a long way to go. My husband was always afraid. And he didn’t want me to step out and to do this because he didn’t know what would happen to me. I told him one day, I said, “If anything should happen to me, just make me one promise that you would take care of the children and raise them.” Regardless of what would happen to me.
MR. GREENE: I did think of another one, if I may. We got a few more minutes. Something that you said early made me think of this. In your view of things, when you saw that God was able to use one of the most destructive things ever invented to bring people together, that leads me to the topic of faith. Back during that time, was that an important part of the Black community. And if so, did you have churches, where did you go to church, just address that if you will, and talk to Chris again.
MRS. AYERS: Oh, yes. No, they didn’t have churches. You had to go to Knoxville or Clinton; you had to be bused to a church. No, they didn’t have churches here for Black people.
MR. ALBRECHT: Now I’ve heard some people mention the Chapel on the Hill, that that was...
MRS. AYERS: The Chapel on the Hill was a white church and that wasn’t until the ‘50’s when we started to try to integrate our schools that the Black people could go up there and have service there. Now, in 1946, no 1945, there was a recreation hall up in the woods, people could go up there and people from Knoxville would preach up there. Oak Valley, the church that I belong to, I say they came out of the woods and Mt. Zion came out at the same time. So, I came out with Oak Valley and Mount Zion. But I put my membership at Oak Valley, but I go to Mt. Zion, just like I go to Oak Valley. Monday night I told the pastor there, I said, “You know that I’m a part of Mt. Zion and I’m a part of Oak Valley too.” So he said, “I want you to bring your letter on here.” I said, “No, I’m not bringing my letter here. I’m going to let it stay at Oak Valley, but I’m still a part of this church because I came out of the woods with it.” So, that is when the churches first started, in ’46. It has been 60 years for Mt. Zion and next year will be 60 years for Oak Valley. No, there wasn’t any church. They just had this big rec hall where they would have singers to come in, you know, something to entertain people, but not a church.
MR. GREENE: You know, you are, regardless of what people think about you, you are a part of a great American story, the story of Oak Ridge.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. GREENE: I just wondered when you think about that, what kind of emotions, how do you, if you had to say a sentence about being a part of that, what would you say?
MRS. AYERS: Well, I would just say that since I was interested in everything that went on here, I would have to be a part of it. It didn’t make any difference what it was. It didn’t make any difference what it was. I had this friend and she was white. He name was Ceil Myers. I don’t know if you have ever heard of her or not. Well, anyway she was from Georgia and her people disowned her because she associated with Black people. Anyway, anywhere I wanted to go, she was a well-educated woman, anywhere I wanted to go, anything I wanted to do, she could get me into it. Now I have been to so many places where I was the only Black there, but I was there with Ceil Myers. I always kept a friend, somebody that I could stick close to and so many things she opened my eyes to, so many things that she told me, you could do this, you could do that, and I didn’t have any more sense but to try. I did, I tried everything. She told me how to get started about integrating the schools, integrating the hospital. Of course I led the first strike at the Oak Ridge Hospital, the Methodist Medical Center. I led that strike. I really didn’t think I was going to get my job back when it was all over; they hired everybody back but me. They took everybody back but me. They were not going to take me back. So I again went back to Washington D.C. about it. They said that they couldn’t hardly believe what I was saying, but they sent somebody here and they came and posed as a patient to find out if I was telling the truth about what I was telling them. I was telling them the truth. So when he got out of the hospital, he went back to Washington and the orders came down from Washington that they would close the hospital if they didn’t straighten it up. Then of course they wanted to have a meeting with me then. So I met with them and the nursing supervisor said, “We didn’t know you were so unhappy. You should have come and talked to us.” I said, “I couldn’t come and talk to you because you wouldn’t talk to me.” So, but I led that strike. I was out 51 days. No, they weren’t going to take me back. I was a troublemaker and they weren’t going to take me back.
MR. GREENE: Chris, we got about a minute or two.
MR. ALBRECHT: I say we have about covered it then, if we only got a minute left. I admire your enthusiasm for life and I find it very hard to believe that you are 83 years old.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, I am.
MR. ALBRECHT: You’re a remarkable woman.
MRS. AYERS: Age is only a number. It’s according to how you look at it.
MR. ALBRECHT: Amen.
MR. GREENE: Any final statements?
MRS. AYERS: No, I guess not.
MR. GREENE: Okay.
MR. ALBRECHT: Thank you so much.
MRS. AYERS: Oh, sure.
MR. ALBRECHT: It has been a pleasure to hear your stories and to get to know you. Hopefully we will have an opportunity to make this more than just a series of interviews and at that time, like I said we will probably give you a call to see if we could borrow some photographs and so forth.
MRS. AYERS: Okay, okay. I probably would have been a little more helpful if this guy hadn’t served this subpoena on me today.
MR. ALBRECHT: You were more than distracted and because of that I thank you so much for coming. It would have been very understandable if you had begged off and not been here.
MR. GREENE: Let’s just get about 10 seconds of rem-tone.
MR. ALBRECHT: Okay, we just need to get what the room sounds like, so shh.
MR. GREENE: Okay, end rem-tone.
MR. ALBRECHT: It’s something we use when we edit things. We have to have just the sound of nobody talking, but the sound of the room.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF R.L. AYERS
Interviewed by Chris Albrecht
Filmed by Rick Greene
Significant Productions
November 3, 2005
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. ALBRECHT: … your full name and where you live.
MRS. AYERS: My name is R.L. Ayers. I live at 141 Wilberforth Avenue, Oak Ridge, TN.
MR. ALBRECHT: Thank you very much. Now, what year did you first come to oak ridge and tell me a little bit about that.
MRS. AYERS: I came to Oak Ridge, October 1943. I was working at an Army camp in Grenada, Mississippi, near my hometown. This friend came by and said, “I heard of this place in Tennessee where you can make good money. Would you like to go?” I said, “Yes. Sure.” She said, “Well, I’ll get two tickets.” And she did. We headed out to Tennessee. It was not Oak Ridge at that time. We came to Kingston, Tennessee. We crossed over on a little boat on over, it was called J.A. Jones at the time. So we came on to the Personnel there, which we were there all day long at the Personnel trying to get processed in. Then they took us to the hutments, where Black people lived. Black people and white people did not live in the same area. White people had barracks and dormitories, but Black people had huts to live in and that was it for the Black people. The huts were something like a box, made like a box. It had four beds in it. And if they needed more space they would put 8 beds in it, double beds. It had a big pot belly stove in the center of the floor and that was the heat. So we had no running water, no place to cook and no bathrooms in this place. They had a big long place they called it the latrine. That’s where you had to go to do your washing, do your cooking if you wanted to cook anything, take a bath and use the bathroom.
MR. ALBRECHT: When you arrived and you saw where you would be living, did you suddenly have second thoughts?
MRS. AYERS: I didn’t see where I was going to be living until I was bused there. No, I was too far from home then and broke at that. (Laughter) I didn’t have any second thoughts. I thought, “Well, we’ll make it.” That’s what I thought to myself that we will make it. So, they had only one building and we came to the K-25 area. They had one building then that was the K-25 building. Of course, you know they built more building, which were 33 and 1401 and all that. But there was only one building then and that was the K-25 building. We went to work at that building. If you were Black, even if you had a master’s degree it made no difference. All you could do was sweep up, clean up. In ’43, that’s all that you could do. So, I wasn’t making but $1.47 an hour, but it was better than where I came from. I worked at the K-25 building I guess maybe for a month. After I began to learn things, I went to the J.A. Jones. They owned the cafeteria. J.A. Jones was building that area down through there. That was the construction gang that was building down through there. So I went to work for J.A. Jones in the cafeteria and I didn’t have to buy my food. That’s why I went there.
MR. GREENE: Chris, we need to change batteries.
[Break in tape]
MR. GREENE: We’re rolling.
MR. ALBRECHT: Were you married when you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. AYERS: No, I was not. But I hadn’t been here very long before I got married. My husband came from Huntsville, Alabama. He was a concrete finisher here. He had worked with Hal Williams and the construction and all that because that was the only thing for Black males to do was construction and my husband worked in construction.
MR. ALBRECHT: You mentioned a few minutes a go about it didn’t matter as a Black person, it didn’t matter if you had a master’s degree you were going to be sweeping the floor.
MRS. AYERS: That’s right.
MR. ALBRECHT: Did you know of or did you meet any, or hear of any educated Black people that were here pushing brooms.
MRS. AYERS: As every Black person here. Every Black people here. No Black person held a high position or worked in an office or anything like that.
MR. ALBRECHT: Where there any of the Blacks that had college degrees that you know of?
MRS. AYERS: Yes, yes, it was.
MR. ALBRECHT: And they were pushing brooms.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, they were still a maid. You know, I have made the statement once that this place was owned and operated by the federal government and it was sad the way that the Black people were treated.
MR. ALBRECHT: Now at that time, at the time of the war, President Roosevelt signed executive order 8802 that said it was illegal to discriminate if you were a war time industry. And yet in Oak Ridge that was patently ignored. They said they would go along with the local customs instead. Was that widely known among the workers that there was that executive order and it was being ignored?
MRS. AYERS: Maybe some of them knew about it. But not everybody. People just didn’t have time to talk with each other. Even if they did it wouldn’t have done any good. It was just something else they knew about it. But I always had an exploring mind. I wanted to know if the grass was greener on the other side of the hill or not. So I kept my nose into everybody’s business, but it was just things that I wanted to find out. They said, “Oh, she talks too much.” That’s what they thought about me. I talked too much. But that was just the way it was.
MR. ALBRECHT: You had mentioned that you hadn’t been here very long at all before you met and married your husband.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Once you became man and wife, were you able to live together?
MRS. AYERS: No, we was not. They had, in these huts that I was talking about; they were inside what they would call a pen. They had all the women in one pen and the men were in another pen. They had board, five foot board around it with a strand of barbed wire at the top that you could not get in or get out. You had to come in by the guard. They had one way in and one way out. That was the men and the women. There was no family life for Black people here until the late, late ‘40’s. That was just the life for Black people. That was the reason that I said a while ago that it was awful the way that Black people were treated and it was in the federal government, all of it.
MR. ALBRECHT: Humans are what they are and they’ve got a way of overcoming obstacles. How did husbands and wives get together?
MRS. AYERS: Well, on weekends when you weren’t working you could go to Knoxville. You could go to Knoxville and spend the weekend with your husband or husband with wife. That was it. When you came back, you went to your pen and he went to his pen.
MR. ALBRECHT: Were the other women in your hut, were they all married or were they all single?
MRS. AYERS: No, they was not. They weren’t all married, maybe one of them or two of them. No, they was not all married.
MR. ALBRECHT: Again, people find a way to do things. Were there people sneaking out at night and getting away with it?
MRS. AYERS: No, you couldn’t sneak out at night because the guard was sitting at the gate and you couldn’t get out of the pen. So there was no way to get out. As I said, there was one way in and one way out.
MR. ALBRECHT: You said that the white workers had different housing.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Where were they housed?
MRS. AYERS: They was housed, oh, it was called Clinton Engineer. It was where Scarboro, old man Scarboro owned all that property in there. It was something like barracks for soldiers and of course they moved all the soldiers and everything out. That is where white people lived. They had running water; they had family lives, because a man could live with his wife there and the children. And they had white schools for white children. There was no Black children here, so there were no schools. It wasn’t until ’46 and ’47 that they started letting Black children come here. So…
MR. GREENE: Chris let me, again, I want to ask the question, talk to Chris, were there white people that lived in the hutments in the pens.
MRS. AYERS: No. No white people ever lived in the pen. None. No.
MR. GREENE: Amazing.
MR. ALBRECHT: Truly amazing. I want to get into talking more about work, but before we get into work, while we’re still talking about living conditions, husbands and wives, that sort of thing. Are there any special stories you can think of that would be appropriate to tell about anything that we haven’t asked questions about, as far as living conditions and that type of thing?
MRS. AYERS: There probably is if I could think of them because I have told many stories about things that happened here. But today, I couldn’t tell you anything. I had my mind, it kind of drifted away on this other stuff when they served this subpoena on me just before I came here.
MR. ALBRECHT: I understand, I truly do. As were…
MR. GREENE: I was going to say what I think you were going to say.
MR. ALBRECHT: Go ahead.
MR. GREENE: If it comes to mind, just tell them. Even if we don’t ask.
MRS. AYERS: Alright.
MR. ALBRECHT: As we go down through here something might pop into your head, let me know that it did and we’ll be sure to get that. I want to talk a little bit about what life was like at work. You started to talk about that, but tell me again, what was your, you told me your job, you was sweeping floors and then you went to work in the cafeteria, correct?
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Tell us a little, which one of those jobs did you work at the longest, the cafeteria or the broom?
MRS. AYERS: I worked at the cafeteria the longest and when they finished this part over here which was called Clinton Engineer, they had a hospital over here. So, then I transferred to the hospital and went to the hospital to work. I worked there for 56 years at the hospital.
MR. ALBRECHT: Tell me a little bit about what your work was at the cafeteria, and then I want to hear about what you did at the hospital.
MRS. AYERS: Well, in the cafeteria, you just cleaned up after, it’s just like working in a cafeteria, and you know a restaurant. You just clean up and washed dishes and stuff like that. Kept it clean.
MR. ALBRECHT: So you didn’t work as like a cook or anything?
MRS. AYERS: Oh, no. No.
MR. ALBRECHT: Pardon my naivety. I wasn’t there, so that’s why I ask the questions. (Laughter) Tell us about how you happened to find the job at the hospital, and how you got over there, and what your job there was.
MRS. AYERS: Well, I was always off into the medical departments, where ever I was, you know. That was really my field, was medical. And they were hiring everybody. It didn’t make any difference who and where. They would hire you, whether it was sweeping a floor, whether it was cooking, or cleaning, or what. Any time that you could walk off of this job over to this job, they would hire you over there. You could get a job anywhere you say I want to work. So, I went to the hospital and I started working there as an aide. You know what an aide is? Helping patients. And I started to working there. I stayed there for 56 years. I worked in the emergency department and when the doctors took over the emergency room, I had too much seniority with the hospital to go under the doctors. So I went to surgery and I started working in the anesthesia department. That is where I retired from was anesthesia.
MR. ALBRECHT: I assume you got training along the way and constantly…
MRS. AYERS: Well, yes, I did get some training, but I did a lot of training myself. I did because I always had my ears open to everything. I worked with the doctors. I waited on them and I helped them. If there was anything I wanted to know, I would ask them. Of course, they would tell me whatever I asked them, they would tell me. I always had an exploring mind. I told you that. (Laughter)
MR. ALBRECHT: You alluded to it earlier, when you first decided to come from Mississippi up here to work. You said part of it was the lure of good money. What kind of money did you make throughout the war years?
MRS. AYERS: I made $1.35 an hour. That was good money from where I came from. I came out of Mississippi where I was making $2.00 a week. So $1.35 an hour was good money. I worked my way on up the ladder.
MR. ALBRECHT: Good for you. What did you do in Mississippi before you came to Tennessee?
MRS. AYERS: I worked as a soda jerk at Camp McCain. I worked as a soda jerk.
MR. ALBRECHT: And made that huge, huge salary doing it. (Laughter)
MRS. AYERS: Yes, $2.00 a week.
MR. ALBRECHT: Oh, my. I have heard some other folks being asked to and agreeing to giving a day of work for the bomb.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, everybody was asked to give one of the time and a half days, or a double time day, which if you worked a Saturday or Sunday, it was Saturday was a time and a half, Sunday would be double time. Everybody gave a day’s work to the building of the atomic bomb.
MR. ALBRECHT: Which brings up another question. This was during the time that the atomic bomb was being developed. This was a big secret. This was a secret city. Say nothing, ask nothing. How did people, how did they ask you to donate to the bomb if nobody knew they were building a bomb.
MRS. AYERS: Well, people knew that they were building a bomb. They knew that. Of course, you know the bomb wasn’t built here. Only part of it. They had six plants in the United States where the bomb was built. Of course, It was assembled in California and then shipped on over to be dropped. People didn’t know that and people really didn’t care anything about that. But that’s what happened.
MR. ALBRECHT: So it was, the bomb wasn’t too big a secret. It was just a little bit of a secret, I guess.
MRS. AYERS: Well, it was a secret because they had like Hal said, “What you see here, what you hear here, you leave it here.” You didn’t talk about anything.
MR. ALBRECHT: What about while you were here? Did people talk; did people try to figure out what was going on?
MRS. AYERS: No, I don’t think they really cared. I don’t think so. Maybe they did care. There wasn’t anybody to talk to about it. Who could you talk to? I couldn’t talk to my neighbor because they didn’t know anything about it, and didn’t want to know anything about it.
MR. ALBRECHT: What typically were you told about the overall mission of the Manhattan Project and the Clinton Engineer Works? Or did anybody ever say, just do your job.
MRS. AYERS: Just do your job. That was it. Just do your job.
MR. ALBRECHT: What did you think when you first learned that an atomic bomb that was partially developed here was dropped on Japan?
MRS. AYERS: Hiroshima? Well, I knew that part of it was made here. I knew that because my ears were always open. I couldn’t say anything or couldn’t talk to anybody about anything. There was nobody to talk to about it. But I listened to everything that was said. I went down. If I was anywhere around it, I heard it. But that was it.
MR. ALBRECHT: I keep getting this reoccurring theme that you were an inquiring mind.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Did you have any other family members that were working up here?
MRS. AYERS: No, I did not.
MR. ALBRECHT: Was there anyone else? Well, you mentioned you came up, were there many people from your hometown.
MRS. AYERS: No, there was only myself and Francis Sharper. We were the only two from my hometown here. We really wasn’t from the same town. She came from Dove Hill, and I came from Carrolton, which was about 12 miles, because we knew each other. But that was it.
MR. ALBRECHT: You said earlier that she said hey they’re hiring people up in Tennessee and there is good money to be made. How did she learn about it?
MRS. AYERS: I don’t really know. I don’t really know how she found out about it. She worked for Dr. Rayford, a doctor there in Grenada, Mississippi, and maybe she got it from them. But anyway, she told it to me and we started running.
MR. ALBRECHT: I know there was a lot of recruiting and they needed a lot of labor and I didn’t know how she might have heard, if somebody came through town or what might have happened. How did you first learn about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima?
MRS. AYERS: How did I learn about it? It was nationwide at that time on the radio when it was dropped. Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: I didn’t know if you might have heard it on the radio, or heard about it from a friend, or something else.
MRS. AYERS: No, I didn’t hear it from a friend. I heard about it from the radio, the news. That was the day the world stood still.
MR. ALBRECHT: What did you think when you first learned, you know, when you heard that bomb had been dropped what were your thoughts?
MRS. AYERS: I said, “Oh! That was a part of what we were doing.” You know how things will all come to you. So, that was the first thing that I thought. That’s what we were giving the free time for and all of that. But it was somewhere else. So that didn’t bother me too much. It should have, but it didn’t.
MR. ALBRECHT: How do you feel about that today?
MRS. AYERS: Well, I don’t know. Not really. You know I said that God used the most destructive weapon known to man to bring people together. And that’s how I feel about that. So, I guess we would have still been running here, running there, and people against people, which they still are. But He did bring people together. Here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, He brought them together here. People was, they didn’t care anything about anything, they didn’t care anything about people, their friends or neighbor, or anything like that. So, something had to happen. Something had to happen to bring them together. And I think that atomic bomb did bring them together. Now, that’s how I feel about it and I could be wrong because I am wrong sometimes, but not all the time.
MR. ALBRECHT: When it comes to an opinion yours is always right. (Laughter) This may be a hard question, it may not be, but if you had it to do all over again, especially considering what your life was like before coming here and what it was like after coming here, would you do it again?
MRS. AYERS: Yes, I guess that I would. I guess that I would, not knowing any better, I would. Of course, where would you go, what would you have to do if you did know better and this is what was happening. I guess you would have to join, as I say the gang.
MR. ALBRECHT: I can’t imagine. You came here; you met your husband here. You made a life here.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Obviously you stayed here. When the war ended, what made you decide to stay here? I guess I should preface that with where was your husband from.
MRS. AYERS: My husband was from Huntsville, Alabama.
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s right. You already said that. I’m sorry. Why did you choose to stay here?
MRS. AYERS: Well, didn’t anybody know me back then. I had been gone a long time. Nobody knew me back there. This was home. I had made friends here, so where else would I go? And now, I’m 83 years old. There is no place for me to go. My husband is dead. One of my sons live in Cool Rapids, Minnesota, and the other is in Albuquerque New Mexico. It’s just me here. I do have grandchildren that live over in Knoxville, but this is home. Nobody back in Carrolton, Mississippi, knows me, not half of my people.
MR. ALBRECHT: What other stories, or what else comes to mind when you think about the war years here at, what is now Oak Ridge. I know it wasn’t Oak Ridge then.
MRS. AYERS: Well, I don’t know.
MR. ALBRECHT: What about recreation and so forth? Did you work so hard during the week that you didn’t have time to think about it? Was there recreation? What did you do with your free time?
MRS. AYERS: Well, I didn’t have much free time because I had two boys and all of my time went to them. I started them out at the Boy’s Club there. I followed them all the way from kindergarten on to Austin-Peay University. So my life was busy. It was always busy. If it wasn’t my children, it was somebody else’s. I remember that these little boys, I guess there was maybe six or eight of them and they were always at my house. When I would get off of work, it didn’t make no difference how tired I was, I would look up and there were all these little boys around. But I would rather these little boys be at my house than my children at somebody else’s house. So I would come in and I would fix hot dogs or hamburgers and I didn’t have enough chairs for them to sit down. So I stood them up around the table. They all stood around the table and had their hot dog. So one of my neighbors, he said to me, “You know,” says, his son was named Robert. He said, “There is something wrong with Robert,” said, “I can’t get him to eat anything,” and I laughed. He said, “What you laughing about?” I said simply, “Because he is eating three meals at my house. How can he eat at home?” He said, “Well, don’t feed him anymore then. Don’t feed him.” Well, I said, “You better keep him at home because if he is there and the other children are eating,” I said, “he’ll eat, too.” So that was, I told him that. Of course he didn’t stop me, he just left him alone. He was still eating at my house. Another little boy said to me one day, said, he kept sitting around, we were sitting out in the yard, and he said, “I heard my mom and daddy talking last night.” I said, “You did?” I said, “Well, what did they say?” He said, “That they didn’t want me.” I said, “You mean they said they didn’t want you. He said, “Hmm-mm.” I knew he was telling a story, but he wanted to live at my house is what he wanted to do, you know. So I said, “Oh, surely they didn’t mean that?” He said, “I heard them say it.” So I saw his parents and I told them what he said. I said, “Now don’t go and jump on him for saying that.” I said that I knew that he was not telling me the truth. They said, “No. The thing of it is that he wants to come to your house and live. That’s what it is.” They loved my house because I was always good to them and I was always doing things with them. I was always taking them places, regardless. I went to work on midnights at the hospital, so that I could have the time to spend with my children. I worked on midnights so I had all these other little boys too there.
MR. ALBRECHT: You must have been exhausted all the time.
MRS. AYERS: I was. I was, but I enjoyed it all. I enjoyed it all. Even when my boys started in high school, they couldn’t come home and tell me anything that I wouldn’t check out. I would check out everything. I was not going to the school and have a fuss with the teacher until I checked it out. I had to know that they were telling me the truth. They was afraid. They wouldn’t tell me no tale, because they knew that I was going to check it out. But I enjoyed all of that. And anything that went on at the high school with them or the teacher or anybody else, I was always there. I was always there. I don’t care what it was and even one of my sons had started missing class down there at Austin-Peay University. One of the teachers called me and was telling me about it. I said, “Okay, I’ll be down there.” I would jump in my car. It wouldn’t make any difference to me. I would go. I went down to Austin-Peay University to see what was going on down there. My son had left with another boy going down to Memphis, Tennessee. Yes, he did too. But I got all that straightened out. All of it straightened out.
I admire your involvement in your children’s lives. There is not enough of that.
No, that is true, there is not.
MR. ALBRECHT: Let me back up a little bit before your sons were born, before the war was over. Obviously, you couldn’t have a family here during the war. What did you do for recreation in those days.
MRS. AYERS: No, let me go back to my children. Both of my boys was adopted. Both of my boys was adopted and I adopted them from the Methodist Medical Center Oak Ridge Hospital. So they had never been in no other home except mine because one of them was five days old when I took him home from the hospital and the other one was two weeks because he was premature before I took him home from the hospital, but both of my boys was adopted.
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s a wonderful story.
MRS. AYERS: And then for recreation?
MR. ALBRECHT: During the war.
MRS. AYERS: You could go to; they had a recreation hall, where all the Black people could meet. They called it the Recreation Hall and everybody would go there. If you wanted to dance, they had a rock hall in there; they had a pool table in there. You could shoot pool if you wanted to. They had a basketball goal outside that you could play basketball. Whatever you wanted to do you had to do it right around that recreation hall there. That was, and as I said, there was a curfew, 10 o’clock at night, and everybody had to be in their hut because there was a hut check. But that was the only recreation. And the only way you could be out after 10 o’clock at night, you would have to be, see I played on the basketball team and if I went to Knoxville or Kingston or somewhere, you know, if I got in after 10 it was alright but otherwise I had better be in.
MR. ALBRECHT: Tell us a little bit about the basketball team.
MRS. AYERS: Well they had a basketball team. As I said they had people from every walk of life at that, at K-25, but the only jobs that they could have there was maid and construction, but people who wanted to form a basketball team, they could because we did have teachers there and they could and they did. Whoever wanted to join the basketball team, it was alright. So I joined the basketball team because I played basketball at high school when I was at home. So I joined the basketball team. It was a way of getting out and getting away.
MR. GREENE: Hey Chris, a follow up to that.
MR. ALBRECHT: Sure.
MR. GREENE: Was it a Black basketball team, or mixed?
MRS. AYERS: No, it was Black. It was all Black.
MR. ALBRECHT: Those were certainly the ugly days of segregation and discrimination. What other examples of that sort of thing did you see working here during the war?
MRS. AYERS: Well, everything was segregated to the max here during that time and as I said, I kept my nose off into everybody’s business and everything, so in the late ‘40’s and the early ‘50’s I remember that they had the Black children could not go to school here. They had to be bused to Clinton, over in Clinton, Tennessee, or if they were in high school they had to go to Austin-East. There was Oak Ridge High school, but the Black children could not go. Well in 1951, they did let the Black children graduate. It was 3 of them that graduated. And they held two graduations in 1951. They had a Black one and a white one. So those three Black children graduated on a Monday night and the other white children graduated on a Friday night. Yes. So then we started working on trying to get the schools segregated, integrated, ‘cause it was segregated to the max. We started trying and we met with the school principals and teachers here. The principal didn’t even want to talk to us because he knew that they wasn’t going to do that. So, what we did was we sat down and wrote Mr. Faraly. His name was Faraly in Washington D.C. and we asked him for a telephone number because we wanted to call him and talk to him about the Oak Ridge school system. We got a telephone number from him and we called him and told him to sit down because we wanted to tell him something. We didn’t want him to fall down, but sit down. So he laughed, and he said he couldn’t believe the things that we told him that was going on here in the school system. But in 1955, they opened the doors to the school and I have newspaper clippings and everything. I was looking at them last night, I think it was last night that I was looking at those newspaper clippings where Mr. Dunnigan, the principal, when he met the children to greet them he told them that this wasn’t to educate them, but to, to educate them, but to how to get along with other people. Yes, he did. I can’t get it together, but I was looking at that last night. He wanted them to know that this was to educate them on how to get along with their peers. He said, “But we will consider race and color, he said, but not before anything else is considered.” I wish I had brought that with me.
MR. ALBRECHT: That makes me want to ask a question. You’ve obviously got mementos from the war and during that time, integration and so forth.
MRS. AYERS: Yes. Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: As this project rolls forward and we have a use for that type of material. I hope it would be alright to contact you and get copies or scan these things so we can use these in this. Rick, do you have any other questions?
MR. GREENE: Yeah. In fact I do. I was wondering, I know I’ve been just sort of amazed when I hear the stories of the changes that happened between 1943 and 1945 in this community. I was wondering, I know for me things get to be a blur, but if you could describe, or if you could remember what this place looked like when you arrived and then what it looked like two years later. Is that something that you could kind of talk about the changes that took place between the time you arrived and say 1945, 6?
MR. ALBRECHT: That means you’re going to have to talk about mud.
MRS. AYERS: Yes. That is just about all it was here - mud and boardwalks. There was no concrete walks or anything like that. It was just a place where people had to live and that was it. There was nothing of any importance or anything. Nothing because at K-25 there was nothing there that you could compare with anything else anywhere in the world, I know. As time, it wasn’t until the ‘50’s when the thing was beginning to come together and you know building things and the way it would look like someplace to live. Of course, you know this is the city that was built twice. At first it was the city behind the fence and then when the gates came down it was an open city. It was built twice. The first city was nothing. But it was the city.
MR. ALBRECHT: It was what the fourth of fifth largest city in the state. It was amazing what they did in such a short amount of time.
MRS. AYERS: Well, people came here from all over the United States they came here. Of course from Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama, more people from those three states than any other states in the United States came here. They went, I think it was 175,000 in ’46, not quite sure. I don’t know.
MR. GREENE: I guess the other question, and I think you have touched on some, but what it was like, I understand that things were rationed. I’ve heard people say if there was a line they stood in it. It didn’t matter what it was for, but it was something they needed. I wonder how it was different for the Blacks and for the whites, and you know, when you’re not at work.
MRS. AYERS: Well, you couldn’t compare the Blacks with the whites because if there was something going on here for the Black, the white was not there. If there was anything going on over there for the whites, the Blacks weren’t there. You couldn’t compare one with the other one. Did that answer your question?
MR. GREENE: Yeah.
MR. ALBRECHT: It was two different worlds all together.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. It was.
MR. ALBRECHT: Have you thought of any other stories of things that happened during that time period that you would like to talk about, or just commentary on the whole process, you know all that happened here.
MRS. AYERS: No. no.
MR. ALBRECHT: You’ve done a wonderful job.
MRS. AYERS: Well, thank you.
MR. GREENE: You’ll probably walk out the door saying, “Ahh!”
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s the way it works.
MRS. AYERS: You know back in the early ‘40’s and nobody knew what they were doing, you know they were just working doing what they were told to do. So, this one guy told his supervisor that he was going to quit. He said, “Why are you going to quit?” He said, “I’m going to get me a real war job.” Because all the trucks coming and nothing ever going out, he said, “I want a war job.” So he quit his job and left. People didn’t know what they were doing, or where they were going or what was happening. This carpenter he had a set answer for anything anyone would ask him. Somebody asked him, “Oh, what are you doing?” He was making something you know. He said, “What are you making?” He said, “$1.35 an hour.” (Laughter) That was his answer to everything, “$1.35 an hour.”
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s funny. I like that. (Laughter)
MR. GREENE: We have sat through so many of these interviews; you may have already answered this question. You know Valeria Roberson?
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. GREENE: The essay she wrote for some book…
MR. ALBRECHT: “These are our voices.”
MR. GREENE: Yes. She entitled, “A New Hope”. She talked about, it’s kind of interesting the stories that we have heard was not that people were recruited, its word of mouth. Somebody knew someone that said you ought to come up here and work. One of the things she talked about was that there was a new hope that things would be different here. So I was wondering if you could talk about that. We know that there were a lot of things that weren’t different, regardless of that executive order that the president issued about it being illegal to discriminate. We know that didn’t happen, but in general, how were things here compared to I guess things where you had come from. Does that make any sense?
MRS. AYERS: Yes, that makes sense, but where I came from was nothing like this place as far as segregation was concerned. You could talk to a white person, or you could go around them, where I came from. When I got here, no, there was no way. The Black people, as they used the term, lived across the railroad tracks, and of course, you didn’t go across the railroad tracks here. You just stayed on this side and they were on that side. And that was that. I had talked to Valeria about a lot of stuff that went on here because you see Valeria came here as a little girl. She was wanting to know a few things that happened here. But no, there was no comparison from where I came from and this place here. None, what so ever.
MR. GREENE: So this was even more segregated.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, it really was. and you know when we tried to start integrate the places here in Oak Ridge, well the one that always go back to my mind is the Laundromat up on Jefferson Circle and we was, went to the Laundromat to wash and the Laundromat was owned by a man named Joe Young. He said we couldn’t wash there. So we started picketing his place. Well one day we noticed that all these policemen were there. After a while here come 10 cars of Ku Klux Klan they came and the police surrounded the place. We was just marching and singing “We shall overcome”. The Ku Klux Klan got out of their cars. They were hooded; they were wearing their hoods, went in the Laundromat, took off their robes, washed them, dried them, came back out and put down a sign where we were marching. And the sign read, “The Ku Klux Klan has been here”. So all these policemen, they were from Knoxville, Clinton, Oak Ridge, Kingston, and everywhere. Of course they had the place surrounded, they called it, oh, what did they say that was? Spreading the eagle. They spread the eagle. We were scared to death, but we wasn’t doing nothing but marching and singing, you couldn’t let anybody know that you were afraid. You just kept singing. They went on and got in their cars and pulled off. So I guess maybe 4 or 5 carloads of police followed them on out Oak Ridge to Maryville. They was from Maryville, Tennessee. They went on back and we didn’t have no more problems with that.
MR. ALBRECHT: Those stories just amaze me. These are things that happened in my lifetime, but I don’t, I was a child. I didn’t know what was going on.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, yes.
MR. ALBRECHT: Because we have come a long ways.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, but we still have a long way to go. My husband was always afraid. And he didn’t want me to step out and to do this because he didn’t know what would happen to me. I told him one day, I said, “If anything should happen to me, just make me one promise that you would take care of the children and raise them.” Regardless of what would happen to me.
MR. GREENE: I did think of another one, if I may. We got a few more minutes. Something that you said early made me think of this. In your view of things, when you saw that God was able to use one of the most destructive things ever invented to bring people together, that leads me to the topic of faith. Back during that time, was that an important part of the Black community. And if so, did you have churches, where did you go to church, just address that if you will, and talk to Chris again.
MRS. AYERS: Oh, yes. No, they didn’t have churches. You had to go to Knoxville or Clinton; you had to be bused to a church. No, they didn’t have churches here for Black people.
MR. ALBRECHT: Now I’ve heard some people mention the Chapel on the Hill, that that was...
MRS. AYERS: The Chapel on the Hill was a white church and that wasn’t until the ‘50’s when we started to try to integrate our schools that the Black people could go up there and have service there. Now, in 1946, no 1945, there was a recreation hall up in the woods, people could go up there and people from Knoxville would preach up there. Oak Valley, the church that I belong to, I say they came out of the woods and Mt. Zion came out at the same time. So, I came out with Oak Valley and Mount Zion. But I put my membership at Oak Valley, but I go to Mt. Zion, just like I go to Oak Valley. Monday night I told the pastor there, I said, “You know that I’m a part of Mt. Zion and I’m a part of Oak Valley too.” So he said, “I want you to bring your letter on here.” I said, “No, I’m not bringing my letter here. I’m going to let it stay at Oak Valley, but I’m still a part of this church because I came out of the woods with it.” So, that is when the churches first started, in ’46. It has been 60 years for Mt. Zion and next year will be 60 years for Oak Valley. No, there wasn’t any church. They just had this big rec hall where they would have singers to come in, you know, something to entertain people, but not a church.
MR. GREENE: You know, you are, regardless of what people think about you, you are a part of a great American story, the story of Oak Ridge.
MRS. AYERS: Yes.
MR. GREENE: I just wondered when you think about that, what kind of emotions, how do you, if you had to say a sentence about being a part of that, what would you say?
MRS. AYERS: Well, I would just say that since I was interested in everything that went on here, I would have to be a part of it. It didn’t make any difference what it was. It didn’t make any difference what it was. I had this friend and she was white. He name was Ceil Myers. I don’t know if you have ever heard of her or not. Well, anyway she was from Georgia and her people disowned her because she associated with Black people. Anyway, anywhere I wanted to go, she was a well-educated woman, anywhere I wanted to go, anything I wanted to do, she could get me into it. Now I have been to so many places where I was the only Black there, but I was there with Ceil Myers. I always kept a friend, somebody that I could stick close to and so many things she opened my eyes to, so many things that she told me, you could do this, you could do that, and I didn’t have any more sense but to try. I did, I tried everything. She told me how to get started about integrating the schools, integrating the hospital. Of course I led the first strike at the Oak Ridge Hospital, the Methodist Medical Center. I led that strike. I really didn’t think I was going to get my job back when it was all over; they hired everybody back but me. They took everybody back but me. They were not going to take me back. So I again went back to Washington D.C. about it. They said that they couldn’t hardly believe what I was saying, but they sent somebody here and they came and posed as a patient to find out if I was telling the truth about what I was telling them. I was telling them the truth. So when he got out of the hospital, he went back to Washington and the orders came down from Washington that they would close the hospital if they didn’t straighten it up. Then of course they wanted to have a meeting with me then. So I met with them and the nursing supervisor said, “We didn’t know you were so unhappy. You should have come and talked to us.” I said, “I couldn’t come and talk to you because you wouldn’t talk to me.” So, but I led that strike. I was out 51 days. No, they weren’t going to take me back. I was a troublemaker and they weren’t going to take me back.
MR. GREENE: Chris, we got about a minute or two.
MR. ALBRECHT: I say we have about covered it then, if we only got a minute left. I admire your enthusiasm for life and I find it very hard to believe that you are 83 years old.
MRS. AYERS: Yes, I am.
MR. ALBRECHT: You’re a remarkable woman.
MRS. AYERS: Age is only a number. It’s according to how you look at it.
MR. ALBRECHT: Amen.
MR. GREENE: Any final statements?
MRS. AYERS: No, I guess not.
MR. GREENE: Okay.
MR. ALBRECHT: Thank you so much.
MRS. AYERS: Oh, sure.
MR. ALBRECHT: It has been a pleasure to hear your stories and to get to know you. Hopefully we will have an opportunity to make this more than just a series of interviews and at that time, like I said we will probably give you a call to see if we could borrow some photographs and so forth.
MRS. AYERS: Okay, okay. I probably would have been a little more helpful if this guy hadn’t served this subpoena on me today.
MR. ALBRECHT: You were more than distracted and because of that I thank you so much for coming. It would have been very understandable if you had begged off and not been here.
MR. GREENE: Let’s just get about 10 seconds of rem-tone.
MR. ALBRECHT: Okay, we just need to get what the room sounds like, so shh.
MR. GREENE: Okay, end rem-tone.
MR. ALBRECHT: It’s something we use when we edit things. We have to have just the sound of nobody talking, but the sound of the room.
[End of Interview]